Posted by Roberta Grimes • November 25, 2023 • 12 Comments
Afterlife Research, Jesus, The Teachings of Jesus, Understanding Reality
It seems we stood and talked like this before.
We looked at each other in the same way then,
But I can’t remember where or when.
The clothes you’re wearing are the clothes you wore.
The smile you are smiling you were smiling then,
But I can’t remember where or when.
Some things that happened for the first time
Seem to be happening again.
And so it seems that we have met before,
And laughed before, and loved before,
But who knows where or when?
– Lorenz Hart (1895-1943) & Richard Rodgers (1902-1979), from “Where or When” (1937)
I still can recall, and vividly, that when I first entered college as a religion major was when I first encountered and grappled with some of the Very Biggest Problems. Even in my freshman year, we were made to wrestle with these new, grownup questions and issues that sometimes kept me awake at night and staring in the dark. I was still at my core a trusting Christian child, and never before had any of this gigantic potential for existential angst ever even occurred to me. How did all this Something arise from nothing? And it was already fine-tuned for intelligent life to evolve from what had been primordial dust? And if even so much as a single pixel in this whole complex picture were to shift by a shade, or if anything ever were to change by a jot, then everything could collapse in upon itself without warning, or else it all might blow apart? It was this new possibility that rocked me at the time, this sudden new awareness of the precariousness of it all. So, was God still even out there?
I mean, think about it. The original creation had happened so long ago! Was the crucial job of being God and remaining in charge to make sure that the universe continued to function a long-term commitment for the genuine God? When you are a child, you don’t want to have to worry about making sure that God remains sufficiently interested in God’s Creation to stay on the job forevermore!
So I look back now, and I realize that those fifty years of doing afterlife research that began for me almost right out of college were a more complex matter on an emotional level than I ever really knew. I still tell the story of my experience of light at the age of eight, and I have traced my wanting to research the afterlife back to that extraordinary night. But I think now that it has been more than that. I think I may have spent my early life chasing a core need to establish a certainty that God really is always going to be there, and God loves me enough to never leave me again.
All of which is a meandering preface to a straightforward statement. There can be no question that God Exists. You can know that for certain, because you exist. And the whole stable reality around you exists. Something cannot come from nothing! So for us to be sure that a Creator exists is simple common sense, all based in the commonsense certainty that Something cannot come from Nothing. Of course, the bearded caricature of a God on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel does not exist. Nor does the cranky Jehovah boogeyman of the Old Testament exist, with all his brutal whims. God is not just a very big humanoid creature made in our own image!
For almost all of human history, though, that grotesque image of God was what we thought we were stuck with. And human leaders soon came to realize that they could imagine for that cartoonish version of God unlimited powers to reward and punish people to the extent of whatever the human mind can conceive, and their subjects would believe it all was possible for God. And so, enter the Roman Emperor Constantine and his Christian clergyman descendants. They could imagine even a loving God who will nevertheless burn your baby in hell alive and aware forever if you don’t get it baptized before it dies.
We came to understand definitively only toward the end of the last century that no such anthropomorphic Christian God exists. But what does exist is an Uncaused Cause without form, without size, and just as Jesus taught, with an immense energy of infinite power. And the True God will never leave us, because – again, just as Jesus taught – the True Creator God’s greatest power is Perfect Love. So the Genuine God does not need our worship. The Genuine God needs nothing from us. It was the bullying and petty old-style gods that we had created in our image as just big people, oversized in every way and even to their gigantic flaws, that were small enough to need our worship. The Genuine God delights in each of us the way a loving parent delights in the one most beloved infant child! Jesus tells us that “God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth” (JN 4:24).
But before we move on to talk about the True God that actually does exist, we should briefly mention the fact that the one belief about God that makes no sense is atheism. Think about it! Materialist scientists continue to hope to get around the pesky fact that the undeniable existence of this complex and longstanding and entirely stable reality gives us proof that a brilliant Creator MUST exist. Scientists try to defend their nonsensical atheism by putting their imagined creation-by-happenstance event extremely far back in time and making it happen really, extremely, gosh-darn quickly, and also very loudly. Materialist scientists even call their imagined first event the “Big Bang.” But of course, that doesn’t really help them, because no matter how far back it was and how quickly it happened, and no matter how loud was its bang, there still is going to be someone in the very back of the room who at some point is going to ask the obvious two questions. But, excuse me, sir, what caused that Bang? And what was there before the Bang happened? Materialist scientists of the atheist bent so deeply hate the fact that atheism is such a demonstrably flawed belief that they even talk about finding long-odds end-runs around the problems with it. Like, for example, the grasping-at-straws notion that maybe we are living in one gigantic simulation. A simulation wouldn’t need a definitive beginning, since it is never real at all!
And of course, right beside the problematic origins-of-the-universe question for atheists are the same continuation worries that plagued me in college. There are an amazing number of variables which must forever remain constant within tiny tolerances, or else this universe will either collapse in upon itself or blow apart; and yet they insist that those variables have all remained where they have to be for billions upon billions of years. Knowing that you and I are each the best-beloved Child of a God Who loves us infinitely, we are certain that God is real, so we can sleep each night without worries! God’s eye is on the sparrow – and on each of the cosmological constants – so we know that God is watching over each of us. But the truth is that the materialist scientists are very well aware by now that those “cosmological constants” which must remain the same are always nevertheless all minutely adjusting. Which fact very strongly implies that there has to be a Divine Cosmological Constants Adjuster out there somewhere, keeping this universe going.
Oh, but it implies nothing of the kind! Not to materialist scientists, it doesn’t. Those scientists just decided one fine day to give up on keeping track of all the essential cosmological constants as they keep on doing their minute-adjusting thing. The scientists have simply set each “constant” at one predetermined value and decided to assume that each of them never will change again, so even as the constants keep on minutely adjusting, now the scientists never will know about it. Rupert Sheldrake’s famously banned Tedx talk on this topic is laugh-out-loud funny because he plays it as a classic straight man. And if you have never seen this talk, please watch it now! I think Dr. Sheldrake may have missed his calling. He really should have been a comedian.
All right. So now, let’s talk about what the genuine High God actually is. Jesus told us, as we quoted Him saying above, that “God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in Spirit and Truth” (JN 4:24). Notice that Jesus is not here insisting that we worship God in the old, fear-based way in which people used to worship God, with rote prayers and blind subjugation. No, since God is Spirit, if we choose to worship our Father who gives us life, which is entirely up to us, we are now to worship God where God is, and in Spirit and in Truth. When Jesus told us that God is Spirit, He was telling us what we now know to be true: God is the highest aspect of Consciousness.
Consciousness is all that exists, and each of us alike is also a part of that same Consciousness. Consciousness is both the sculptor and the clay. Consciousness is a form of energy, and so it vibrates. At its lowest and slowest vibration, consciousness is fear and hatred, which we strive to escape. At its highest vibration it is the High God and perfect love. While people could not have known any of this two thousand years ago, they could at least have known that this new version of God that Jesus was calling Spirit is a departure from what they always had understood God to be, and this new way of praying to God was new as well. Jesus taught us to pray, “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven (MT 6:8-10).
Yes, it felt like a departure to those who first heard these words, but it was love-based and not fear-based, so it also felt liberating to Jesus’s first followers, just as it feels liberating to us. God now is no longer a scary human-like Jehovah, but instead God is a loving Father whose very name is sacred, or Hallowed. And thanks to Jesus, we are now on the path toward joining God where God is, as we work toward elevating our own spiritual vibrations ever closer to becoming one with God in Spirit, and thereby bringing the kingdom of God on earth and ensuring that fear and hatred will be no more. As it is above, so it also will be below. How easily we now understand this prayer which first was prayed two thousand years ago. The very highest aspect of Consciousness is the High God, while all of us also are aspects of that same Consciousness; and as we grow spiritually, we are growing toward what will be the end of our need to ever again incarnate on earth. So once every human being has completed that same journey, God’s kingdom on earth will dawn at last. Every word that Jesus speaks to us is meant to introduce to us our own coming spiritual perfection.
I should add that I have been amazed by how many people have said after I mentioned it last week that they want to take our proposed course in spiritual growth that begins in February. I have tried to keep track, although I am sure that I have missed some people’s emails, but apparently this course-on-giving-a-course that I am now taking includes a way for you to sign up if you like, so please be on the lookout for that. Yes, if you do this course as Jesus intended it based upon His teachings, and then if you will (easily) maintain your elevated vibration, this can be your last necessary trip here, and you will understand why that is true as the three-month teaching phase of the course progresses. I think we will be doing simultaneous courses in the U.S. and Australia, and perhaps also in Europe/Africa, but that will depend on the final number of signups in each time zone. All of that being said, let’s do this now for Jesus! He went through a lot to bring the Truth to us, and I am amazed now to tell you, the Truth really works!
Some things that happened for the first time
Seem to be happening again.
And so it seems that we have met before,
And laughed before, and loved before,
But who knows where or when?
– Lorenz Hart (1895-1943) & Richard Rodgers (1902-1979), from “Where or When” (1937)
Thank you very much, Roberta!
Remember flying a kite?
You are holding the string.
That kite could not fly without you!
Now. imagine you are the kite
and God is holding the string.
You cannot fly without God.!
Oh my dear, this is very sweet! And what a lovely poem – thank you!!
As Roberta points out, materialism is incapable of dealing with the fundamental issue of Creation. The Big Bang surely does not work, because, as Roberta explained, how can the so-called singularity exploding be stated as a the origin without explaining how it originated? Quoting here from a paper of mine:
” Abstract
Consciousness is timeless and immaterial and has an infinite potential for information in which the information coding is immaterial.
Traditional theorizing and philosophizing about Creation possibilities offers two distinct explanations with each of the two not satisfying common sense. First, there is the idea that the world somehow emerged from what had been pure nothingness, no time, no space, nothing; that
idea defies common sense. Second, there is the idea that the world that our senses register simply always existed, even if its form has been changing, such as would follow from the Big Bang; this idea also defies common sense, as we learn and expect that one event triggers the next. But that progression assumes some sort of initiating event, so this solution does not solve the issue by simply assuming its own truth.
What is proposed here is that our common sense analysis is contaminated by its education in a physically appearing world of time and space. As Roberta often mentions, Max Plank had come to a realization that the material world known by our perception, created by body and mind, was a form of illusion [1]:
“I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness. ”
Let us define consciousness to be a “substance” unlike those defined by E = mc2. Consciousness has as a primary attribute self-awareness, but lacks mass and lacks energy; it’s being is perfectly immaterial. Given that consciousness is defined to lack any physical dimensionality, and not to
experience time, it is thus not subject to the forces and change we learn about in our physical experience. Consciousness is timeless and immaterial and has an infinite potential for information in which the information coding is immaterial.
We may next ponder about consciousness as we had earlier inquired about how Creation came about. So, we will assume that consciousness was able to create the physical world, but is not itself material. Thus we ask if consciousness always existed or came from nothing. Given that
consciousness is purely immaterial, it may have sprung from nothingness (i.e., immateriality), and also, since it does not exist in time, it always existed in a timeless realm of being. ”
Yet, this explanation also requires a starting point even for a timeless realm, and that starting point would be God. But then the same issues again arize, how could God appear out of nothingness, or how could God have always existed even in a timeless realm? In 2010, I was trying to figure this out, day after day and getting nowhere. At one point when my frustraion was boiling over, an unvoiced voice came into mind whimsically saying, “I don’t know either.” I had not generated that idea as it came as a complete surprise; this answer was so funny that I would still laugh more a year later whenever I recalled the incident.
Oh my dear beloved Jack, you always make me smile! I think the only possible explanation is that time does not exist. Right? So then if anything ever exists, it must always exist, by definition? At least, that’s the only way that I can solve it!
(Sorry for my very late replies, but I’m in MA seeing legal clients this week.)
Hi Roberta,
I did look up the Rupert Sheldrake Ted Talk and then somehow googled a Rupert Everett Interview, and he said in an interview:
“I think life is struggle. I think we’ve developed a notion now that life shouldn’t be struggle, and that’s quite dangerous. Obviously it’s very appealing, that none of us should struggle, but at that point, we’re just blobs. Struggle is the thing that defines us.”
It resonated with me as the basis for spiritual growth at the end of your blog. And, following the Holiday of Thanksgiving, it’s also OK to be Thankful for the things you still struggle with daily.
My dear Tim, indeed life is struggle, but if it must be that then it needs to be optimally productive struggle which really helps us to progress spiritually. And it is that which the teachings of Jesus really do for us so effectively. You’ll see!!
I am definitely interested in signing up for the course that begins in February. Please let me know how that might happen.
Sending love and appreciation.
My dear Barbara, we will announcing the course and all its details and how you can sign up for it, and especially to everyone who has expressed an interest!
I am very interested in your course. Thank you for all your posts, they really resonate with my soul.
Oh my sweet Susan, I am so glad! And I think we’re going to have a lot of fun with this course, all doing it together with Jesus 😉
Hi Roberta,
Could you please talk about how extraterrestrial encounters and some experiments they do with humans, like being abducted by aliens, can or cannot be controlled by God?
What is their standing before God?
Thank you.
Chris
My dear Chris, do you know, I haven’t thought much about that? All beings are a part of God, and I think the extraterrestrials involved are not especially advanced spiritually. The grays, for example, are reportedly robots. There seem not to be many of these encounters, and perhaps their foolishness inflicted on a few individuals is those folks’ forgiveness opportunities? I’m sorry, but I haven’t looked at these events enough to even hazard a guess.